Reliable web hosting to recommend

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He’s found his reliable web hosting

On this page I’ve put the list of the reliable web hosting companies that I recommend as I’ve been researching hosts since 2016.

This is the list of hosting companies that I personally recommend. And if you become a client of any of these companies after reading this article, I’m responsible for my recommendation. It means that in case of any unresolved issues you may have with the hosting I personally participate in rectifying the situation.

Who may need my hosting recommendations on this page?

Business owners or CTOs looking for a reputable and reliable host for web projects or enterprise needs (you may jump to this section without much further ado).

How can you use these recommendations?

You can read them and get your web hosting right away;

Or it would be great if you do your own research (it may be fun!) reading reviews and real users opinions on forums etc if you have time. And then finally come to the conclusion that I do recommend good stuff.

In short, how it all started and how I’ve come to this list of reliable web hosting companies?

After registering my domain, I was recommended HostGator (back in July 2013), and was about to give it a try.

But I also decided to do some research (yes, I’m a scrutinizer by nature with analytic background 🙂 ) reading what people say about it and other web hosts that were so actively promoted by many review sites and bloggers.

It was really disappointing. So I started looking for other decent and reliable web hosting companies. I started analyzing eclectic and controversial reviews, reading different forums, being a liar-detective. And since then I’ve been watching the hosting market closely.

Paid special attention to negative reviews and how they were explained and resolved.

It took quite a lot of time, much more than I expected, but I enjoyed it.

After reading issues and reviews on different forums and listening to advice of some experts who choose hosting for their clients’ websites I realized that I really like the attitude of relatively smaller companies how they treat and serve their customers. Moreover, I have understood that such hosts, like no other big-branded hosts, can really provide reliable web hosting services accompanied by brilliant support.

Thus, back in July 2013 I chose fantastically reliable web hosting (for different budgets) that have fabulous reputation – StableHost, HawkHost and EuroVPS for myself and my clients. And I still use them (in addition to these hosts, later I started using great value-for-money hosting: SiteGround, VeeroTech, GeekStorage and some other hosts which you can find below with real-time monitoring charts). Apart from that, since 2013 I’ve been using more than one hundred hosts for my SEO project (not connected with researchasahobby.com). But these hosts are more than cheap and I don’t mention them since they are mostly not reliable enough and and not recommended for your blogs or websites that you really care of. Anyway, it’s a good experience to deal with different hosts like that.

Also, as a great side effect of my hosting user experience I have written a series of articles about choosing the best host for a website. I’ve got a list of the web hosts that, as I’ve discovered, have a stellar reputation. So if anyone needs to find a good web hosting it can be much easier using this list as a starting point than looking for one from scratch.

Since the beginning of 2016 I’ve started to utilize a professional monitoring service to get solid data on hosting performance and reliability. You can see real-time charts of all hosts that I monitor this way and historical data on this page and Monthly Hosting Performance Contest roundups are here. The methodology and the results of the monthly Contests are available on this page.

The recommended list of reliable web hosting companies

Disclosure: There are affiliate links on this page. It means that I will likely get a compensation if you click on them and make a purchase. If you want, you may read the details here.

I don’t present the recommended web hosts in a prioritized list because it can be prioritized for certain requirements and personal preferences. (E.g. someone wants cheaper, others need some specific features or options.) Rankings on many review websites are either simplification assuming some average needs or I’d rather believe they are just manipulating.

So for now I’ve just added some comments against each reliable web hosting company that I recommended. (I made the notes as something caught my attention when I was choosing a web host for myself.) I have not included in this list those web hosts that I have found out as not good enough. Only the hosts are included that have great reputation, are trustworthy, and offer great service from both server and customer support point of view.

I have created this recommended list focusing first of all on shared hosting. Also, I’ve included a list of companies that offer VPS, dedicated servers and other enterprise-level hosting solutions.

Hope you will find the recommendations below helpful. Only reputable and reliable web hosting companies are here.

This quiz will help you to choose the shared hosting that is the most comfortable fit for you

I’ve got a number of hosting that I recommend on this page. And to help you find your comfortable choice among the variety of the hosts, I’ve selected six great shared hosting that are designed for different types of clients.

Some hosts fit your better than others. Find out your best match in shared hosting!

So, I’ve created the following quiz which asks you nine questions and then it tells you the following:

Which of the shared hosts is the most likely to be your best choice according to your expectations.

Some explanations about your expectations regarding shared hosting.

Also you’ll get the prioritized list of the shared hosts you to let you know what host to look at first of all.

No email or social sharing required. You just answer the quiz questions and get your results displayed.

Click the button to play to find your the most comfortable shared hosting match:

1. Are you a newbie dealing with hosting and setting up websites?

Complete newbie. Just started with my website. Everything is new for me.

I've had some experience with hosting, but still not very confident in many things like setting up my website on a new hosting.

I can teach others how to setup a website from scratch.

Correct!

Wrong!

-

2. Do you need a phone support?

Yes, it's highly desirable.

It would be nice, but not necessary.

I don't care. I'm not going to use it anyway.

Correct!

Wrong!

-

3. How sensitive are you on your budget?

I want a great hosting, but as cheap as possible.

Not extremely sensitive, but if there's a good discount for a first year or two, it'd be great!

I prefer the highest quality, price is less important to me than the quality of the services.

LiquidWeb is very respected and quite a big company that offers premium-level hosting services for all kinds of customers – starting from newbies and finishing corporate clients offering versatile hosting infrastructure products and solutions.

I know that LiquidWeb’s prices are not the most affordable on the market, but this is the price for professional and solid support services and high performance that can be compared not with shared hosting, but with fully managed VPS. So, if you’re just starting out with your website then you may probably want to check out much more affordable alternatives I recommend on this page, for example SiteGround (with phone and chat support).

Another alternative to LiquidWeb that I can recommend is WP Engine which adds more security, management and development services and features, but not as powerful as LiquidWeb from performance and support point of view.

I recommend LiquidWeb as managed WordPress hosting if you need a really robust and fast hosting (based on fully managed VPS) and a helping hand of live chat and phone support (and ticket help desk, of course) available to you all days and nights long.

LiquidWeb is beneficial to agencies and developers also because it offers iThemes’ Sync Pro plugin for free (you save $120/year on the smallest plan).

Notice: In summer 2016 LiquidWeb sold its shared hosting business to a another company. It let liquidWeb focus on premium and more complex hosting services (such as Managed WordPress Product, fully managed VPS and Dedi, automatically scalable infrastructure Cloud Sites). This could be entirely positive move for LiquidWeb. But how it sold the part of its business was not very ethical from shared hosting clients’ perspective, because for a lot of clients it was very sudden and painful. It’s the only negative aspect in the LiquidWeb hosting’s entire history that has hurt its reputation. Apart from this, LiquidWeb’s developing impressively and has a lot of potential. I’m keeping an eye on it.

WP Engine focuses entirely on WordPress websites. It has great advantages over other generalist hosts because of better technical quality of the services (performance, robustness, scaling) and higher expertise of human support expertise.

It’s fully-managed (which means you may focus on your blog and your business, not a technical side of keeping a website like speed, security, backups etc).

They not only promise to secure your website, but they will also clean it up for free unlimited times if it gets hacked (but their work is not to let it happen in the first place). More details: WP Engine partners with Sucuri and the hosting plans already include the advantages of Sucuri Website Antivirus such as proactively scanning for security and cleaning up security issues. Very attractive, because the Sucuri product is not cheap ($16.99/mo)!

Although it’s premium hosting, it’s not expensive (and much less than their direct competitors) for the services they offer (the minimum plan is $29/mo for 1 website with the limit of 25K visitors per month).

60-day full money-back guarantee.

Flexibly scalable (if one day you get a huge spike of visitors, you’ll not need to upgrade your plan, but just pay additionally $1 for each 1,000 visitors over your limit).

10 GB disk space.

Unlimited data transfer.

Free SSL certificate (LetsEncrypt).

Their own caching system (they make your website fast, you don’t need to deal with any caching plugins).

They offer staging area (a copy of your website) for free where you can make any changes and do any experiments on your website (like installing plugins, publishing pages, posts etc) and see if it works. And then you may deploy it to the live version (very convenient!).

Separate backup system and one-click restore option is included (backups are daily and stored for 30 days on in the independent place so you don’t need an additional backup service).

Both live chat and ticket support.

These guys entirely focus on WordPress hosting, and you’ll get more help and assistance than you may expect.

Since you are not expected to do tech-savvy things while hosting with them, there’s no cPanel.

It’s a great choice if you’re a non-technical user or don’t want to spend time on a technical side of maintaining your website, and it’s not expensive (compared to other alternatives of this kind).

I recommend this hosting as the best WordPress fully managed hosting in regard to value-for-money for websites which have from a small to an upper-intermediate popularity.

You can have 3 months for free orering an annual plan. Go to this link and use discount code funnelwpe (offer expires Thursday, August 31, 2017).

A good alternative to WP Engine is Page.ly‘s $499/mo plan, which makes sense to consider if you have 500K visitors per month or above. Other alternatives to WPEngine which are very good WP managed hosting but focuse on specific audience: LightningBase (much smaller host), FlyWheel (for designers and agencies), WireNine (focusing more on a technical side), LiquidWeb WordPress Managed product (focusing on stellar true VPS-grade performance and high-availability phone support; see above my short review).

After all, WP Engine is one of the most favorite affordable options for many users who has less than 25K visits per month and want fully-managed hosting with enhanced security.

Thanks to SiteGround’s great balance between very user-friendly support, high performance and comparatively moderate prices I consider this host the best choice for beginners and non-tech users, as well as developers. At the same time, thanks to its great options for developers (staging, Git) SiteGround is one of the most favorite hosts for developers and advanced users.

SiteGround took the first place in the Hosting Performance Contest in July 2017 among the upper-class pricing category hosting and won the bronze medal among all the monitored hosts! (See details)

Additional options of enhanced security are available (on some plans). Also, SiteGround partners with the best website security service in the field – Sucuri to watch software vulnerabilities and harden SiteGround’s firewall to actively protect its clients (by the way, you can find more information on Sucuri in my article here).

HTTP/2 is available on all plans (higher performance via HTTPS). You don’t need to do anything from your side to make your site faster – simply use a SSL (e.g. free LetsEncrypt)

Beginner user friendly support and WordPress documentation.

30-day money-back guarantee.

Free migration from your previous host.

I like it for being explicitly restrictive on resource usage, which lets avoid servers usage abuse and maintain better and more stable performance.

Bonus: SiteGround offers its users exclusive 20% discount on modern an very hot page builderElementor Pro. Sign up with SiteGround, log into your User Area and go to the Resources page. There you can find the coupon code.

I recommend SiteGround as a superb balance between support, price, functionality and performance. This brilliant combination is responsible for its clients’ love and loyalty.

SiteGround is a great and not expensive choice for beginners or non-tech users (as well as highly experienced users and developers) who do not have enough budget to go with LiquidWeb or managed hosting like WPEngine or FlyWheel.

At the same time SiteGround offers geeky options (on more expensive plans) like one-click staging, pre-installed Git. Combination of great support, very good server performance, prices and easiness of use makes this hosting one of the most favorite choices for WP developers.

I’ve been using it since May 2016 and according to my 1-min uptime check and 20-min speed check monitors it’s among the best performing hosts. And I really appreciate that their support is trained to be not just useful (expected), but also personal.

SiteGround invests a lot into as high customer satisfaction as possible and thus it targets to be recognized as the best hosting in a wide hosting segment. And it’s on the right way.

I’m monitoring the performance of my small test blog hosted with SiteGround (most basic plan) in Chicago, USA location. I don’t use any caching or other optimization plugins on my site for the purpose of the clear experiment.

By the way, you can see how this hosting and other hosts I’m monitoring have been performing since February 2016 on this page.

Below you can see two charts: HTTP server response time (Time To First Byte) in milliseconds with uptime (website accessibility) and full page load time (how long it takes to fully load a page for a real user) in seconds. The charts are real-time and updated every 1 minute and every 20 minutes respectively. The charts are interactive – you can change a date range and zoom.

The monitoring is performed from different US East and US West locations. Note that down-time or bad performance fixed from just one location does not mean that the website is down or slow to load – it just means that the ping did not come through (or other network issues) along the way from a monitoring location to the server and back. The site may be considered to be down or slow to load if both monitoring locations display issues at the same time.

This hosting focuses on speed. I consider this host to be one of the best performing shared hosting among well-established and large hosts. But this host may be not the best general fit for its price like other hosts I recommend. Read below for my opinion.

A2Hosting took the second place in the Hosting Performance Contest in July 2017 among the upper-class pricing category hosting! (See details)

A2Hosting was the second best performing hosting in 2016 among other hosts I’ve been monitoring (read more here).

Phone, Chat and Tickets support available 24/7. However, the main support channel is tickets. Read details.

Prices start from $3.92/mo for the first invoice for 2-year plan. Regular (renewal) prices are 2 times higher than at the first billing period (e.g. after 2 years the prices increases upto $7.99/mo). 1-year and per-month plans are available.

Free SSH.

Free SSL certificate (LetsEncrypt). Automatic configuration on new accounts if using HTTPS; for existing accounts the activation takes literally in a couple of clicks in a WP dashboard.

You can give your developer(s) access to your A2 account without having to share your account credentials (read more).

I like it for paying a lot of attention to speed optimization and options flexibility. However, I don’t like it for being over-promising on its sales page. Unprepared people may get some information wrong. E.g. notes that A2 Optimized option makes 6x faster page loads or Turbo Option that makes speed upto 20 times faster which are not typically true in real life – see my research on it. However, this host is pretty fast after all.

My special love to this host is that it offers quite a lot of performance-tuning options. Apart from hosting plan upgrading options (nothing very special here), you can get pre-configured custom caching solution based on W3 Total Cache (very good for beginners), additional RAM and CPU to your existing plan (superb option!), as well as get the option for handling traffic spikes (very handy and affordable!). This flexibility provides cheaper option than simply upgrading a plan as other hosts could offer. This flexibility is very advantageous compared to other shared hosts. Besides, on A2’s Turbo plan it lets you get caching solutions (special Turbo cache plus industry-standard Memcached and OPcache) that you are not likely to see with other shared hosts. A2’s options are very flexible and it feels like a VPS-grade hosting but much cheaper than managed VPS. See more details here.

I recommend A2 as a well-performing shared host which successfully manages a lot of clients. If you want a fast hosting which is a big company, it’s a great choice. At the same time I think it may be too expensive after the first billing period on its Turbo (the fastest) plan.

Also note that off-site backups are not included by default in your plan.

A2 is fast compared to many other shared hosts (and its Turbo plan is even faster, although not 20 times), but may become too expensive with all possible paid add-ons included especially after the first billing period. Also, I don’t think that A2’s support is the strongest part of this host (or you need to pay extra that is not cheap). If you are beginner, then it’s a safer choice to go with a cheaper SiteGround (see my review) which you will find more comfortable in case something goes wrong.

As a bottom line, A2 is a great choice for website speed perfectionists who are ready to pay extra and prefer going with a bigger company. But it’s not the ideal choice for those who want not very expensive hosting (especially after the first invoice).

Alternative to A2Hosting is GeekStorage which also focuses on performance, but with more geeky support (it’s much smaller company). Also, it’s more straightforward regarding advertising, whereas A2 presents its services more attractively. Anyway, A2 is a bigger company and it invests more in customer support.

Another worthy alternative is SiteGround (with more advantageous balance between pricing, support and performance).

I’ve been using A2’s cheapest plan since May 2016 and according to my 1-min uptime check and 20-min speed check monitors it’s in the top performing hosts in its pricing category. Also, as I’ve mentioned, I tested A2’s Turbo plan and it was also impressive.

I’m monitoring the performance of my small test blog hosted with A2Hosting (most basic plan) in Michigan, USA location. I don’t use any caching or other optimization plugins on my site for the purpose of the clear experiment.

By the way, you can see how this hosting and other hosts I’m monitoring have been performing since February 2016 on this page.

Below you can see two charts: HTTP server response time (Time To First Byte) in milliseconds with uptime (website accessibility) and full page load time (how long it takes to fully load a page for a real user) in seconds. The charts are real-time and updated every 1 minute and every 20 minutes respectively. The charts are interactive – you can change a date range and zoom.

The monitoring is performed from different US East and US West locations. Note that down-time or bad performance fixed from just one location does not mean that the website is down or slow to load – it just means that the ping did not come through (or other network issues) along the way from a monitoring location to the server and back. The site may be considered to be down or slow to load if both monitoring locations display issues at the same time.

StableHost took the third place in Hosting Performance Contest in June 2017 among the monitored hosts in the middle-class pricing category hosting! (see details)

This is one of my two favorite low-cost hosts that deliver very professional and high-quality hosting services for such low prices. The other one is HawkHost.

It’s a company with great reputation not only among web hosting community, but what is more important – among its clients.

They guarantee that your website will be faster then any other provider you have ever had. Or they will refund your purchase price.

Free daily backups (for 15 days).

45-day money-back guarantee.

Easy drag-and-drop website builder for free (based on Site.Pro, check out a demo).

General CPU restrictions: 15% of 1 CPU Core. These guys will not let bad users abuse the shared server!

They always keep 50% of their servers’ CPU in reserve to make sure even in case of high load peaks websites continue work fast

Unlimited Starter plan: $4.95/mo monthly, 3-month, 6-month and 1-year plans (only $2.48/mo with coupon StableHostRaah for your first invoice); $3.95/mo for 2-year plan (only $1.98/mo with coupon StableHostRaah for your first invoice); $3.5/mo for 3-year plan (only $1.75/mo with coupon StableHostRaah for your first invoice). Minimum term for an invoice is 1 month, maximum term for an invoice is 3 years. Unlimited disk (SDD) space / unlimited bandwidth (~215K visitors per month) / one domain (there are also Pro plan for unlimited domains).

Free migration from your previous host (for most control panels, incl. cPanel – ask StableHost’s support if you’re not sure).

I’ve been using it myself for hosting and managing a website for my client since August 2013. And it’s a just a fabulous service for its price.

I love it for its great performance considering such low prices with lots of disk space. And I liked their servers resource management as prevention from abusing servers by others. It surely adds up credits to this web hosting provider.

I’m monitoring the performance of my small test blog hosted with StableHost (most basic plan) in US, Chicago location. I don’t use any caching or other optimization plugins on my site for the purpose of the clear experiment.

By the way, you can see how this hosting and other hosts I’m monitoring have been performing since February 2016 on this page.

Below you can see two charts: HTTP server response time (Time To First Byte) in milliseconds with uptime (website accessibility) and full page load time (how long it takes to fully load a page for a real user) in seconds. The charts are real-time and updated every 1 minute and every 20 minutes respectively. The charts are interactive – you can change a date range and zoom.

The monitoring is performed from different US East and US West locations. Note that down-time or bad performance fixed from just one location does not mean that the website is down or slow to load – it just means that the ping did not come through (or other network issues) along the way from a monitoring location to the server and back. The site may be considered to be down or slow to load if both monitoring locations display issues at the same time.

I’ve been using it myself in 2013 and 2014 and have been hosting another site with it since the beginning of 2016.

High-quality alternative to HawkHost from this segment is StableHost (better performance).

I’m monitoring the performance of my small test blog hosted with HawkHost (most basic plan) in US, Los Angeles CA location. I don’t use any caching or other optimization plugins on my site for the purpose of the clear experiment.

By the way, you can see how this hosting and other hosts I’m monitoring have been performing since February 2016 on this page.

Below you can see two charts: HTTP server response time (Time To First Byte) in milliseconds with uptime (website accessibility) and full page load time (how long it takes to fully load a page for a real user) in seconds. The charts are real-time and updated every 1 minute and every 20 minutes respectively. The charts are interactive – you can change a date range and zoom.

The monitoring is performed from different US East and US West locations. Note that down-time or bad performance fixed from just one location does not mean that the website is down or slow to load – it just means that the ping did not come through (or other network issues) along the way from a monitoring location to the server and back. The site may be considered to be down or slow to load if both monitoring locations display issues at the same time.

I’m monitoring the performance of my small test blog hosted with Geek Storage (most basic plan) in US Chicago, Illinois. I don’t use any caching or other optimization plugins on my site for the purpose of the clear experiment.

By the way, you can see how this hosting and other hosts I’m monitoring have been performing since February 2016 on this page.

Below you can see two charts: HTTP server response time (Time To First Byte) in milliseconds with uptime (website accessibility) and full page load time (how long it takes to fully load a page for a real user) in seconds. The charts are real-time and updated every 1 minute and every 20 minutes respectively. The charts are interactive – you can change a date range and zoom.

The monitoring is performed from different US East and US West locations. Note that down-time or bad performance fixed from just one location does not mean that the website is down or slow to load – it just means that the ping did not come through (or other network issues) along the way from a monitoring location to the server and back. The site may be considered to be down or slow to load if both monitoring locations display issues at the same time.

VeeroTech took the third place in Hosting Performance Contest in July 2017 among the monitored hosts in the budget hosts category! (see details)

VeeroTech focuses on delivering high reliability against data loss. It’s much appreciated by shared hosting and VPS users for high speed and it has very positive reputation among hosting professionals and clients.

Easy drag-and-drop website builder for free (based on Site.Pro, check out a demo).

Free migration from your previous host.

30-day money-back guarantee. And after that refunds can be applied as a credit.

SSH for free (activated upon request).

Free Let’s Encrypt SSL.

Daily backups for 7 days as a courtesy (via R1Soft which gives you an option to restore your entire account. The backups are stored separately from your server and do not take up your storage quota). But like with other non-premium hosting, it’s recommended also to keep your own backups. For admin use only and disaster recovery the backups are created weekly and monthly.

I’ve been using VeeroTech since February 2016.

I recommend VeeroTech as one of the best hosts of such level with very affordable monthly plans. If you prefer paying monthly for a very decent low-budget hosting, definitely check it out.

The best alternative to VeeroTech I can recommend is StableHost (a similar spirit, small company, but cheaper for longer terms with my discount code – see it here).

I’m monitoring the performance of my small test blog hosted with VeeroTech (most basic plan) in US North Carolina, Raleigh location. I don’t use any caching or other optimization plugins on my site for the purpose of the clear experiment.

By the way, you can see how this hosting and other hosts I’m monitoring have been performing since February 2016 on this page.

Below you can see two charts: HTTP server response time (Time To First Byte) in milliseconds with uptime (website accessibility) and full page load time (how long it takes to fully load a page for a real user) in seconds. The charts are real-time and updated every 1 minute and every 20 minutes respectively. The charts are interactive – you can change a date range and zoom.

The monitoring is performed from different US East and US West locations. Note that down-time or bad performance fixed from just one location does not mean that the website is down or slow to load – it just means that the ping did not come through (or other network issues) along the way from a monitoring location to the server and back. The site may be considered to be down or slow to load if both monitoring locations display issues at the same time.

And if you prefer a bigger company with more support options and developer tools (e.g. 1-click staging) then my strong recommendation is SiteGround (see my review).

MDD Hosting is well-known for a high quality of its premium hosting. The host started offering very affordable plans since 2016 after investing into its infrastructure.

I’m monitoring the performance of my small test blog hosted with MDDHosting (most basic plan) in US Colorado, Denver location. I don’t use any caching or other optimization plugins on my site for the purpose of the clear experiment.

By the way, you can see how this hosting and other hosts I’m monitoring have been performing since February 2016 on this page.

Below you can see two charts: HTTP server response time (Time To First Byte) in milliseconds with uptime (website accessibility) and full page load time (how long it takes to fully load a page for a real user) in seconds. The charts are real-time and updated every 1 minute and every 20 minutes respectively. The charts are interactive – you can change a date range and zoom.

The monitoring is performed from different US East and US West locations. Note that down-time or bad performance fixed from just one location does not mean that the website is down or slow to load – it just means that the ping did not come through (or other network issues) along the way from a monitoring location to the server and back. The site may be considered to be down or slow to load if both monitoring locations display issues at the same time.

Squidix took the bronze medal in the Hosting Performance Contest in May 2016 among all monitored hosts! (See details)

Squidix focuses on personal attitude, providing free consultations for website owners and offering a wide range of hosting plans. It’s one of the premium shared hosting that does extra work on delivering deeper client satisfaction.

Squidix is special in the way that it works with clients more personally than an average host. If you have special needs or some specific requests – just contact them and discuss it. For example, Squidix can assist you for free with such areas as your website design and development, website performance, SEO, scalability etc.

I’m monitoring the performance of my small test blog hosted with Squidix (most basic plan) in US Texas, Dallas location. I don’t use any caching or other optimization plugins on my site for the purpose of the clear experiment.

By the way, you can see how this hosting and other hosts I’m monitoring have been performing since February 2016 on this page.

Below you can see two charts: HTTP server response time (Time To First Byte) in milliseconds with uptime (website accessibility) and full page load time (how long it takes to fully load a page for a real user) in seconds. The charts are real-time and updated every 1 minute and every 20 minutes respectively. The charts are interactive – you can change a date range and zoom.

The monitoring is performed from different US East and US West locations. Note that down-time or bad performance fixed from just one location does not mean that the website is down or slow to load – it just means that the ping did not come through (or other network issues) along the way from a monitoring location to the server and back. The site may be considered to be down or slow to load if both monitoring locations display issues at the same time.

Free daily backups (on separate servers, stored for 30 days) and weekly off-site backups (30 km away from the premise, stored for 7 days). But you don’t have direct access to the backups (you need to request it for the purpose).

Free migration from your previous host (if you have root access and the platforms are the same, e.g. from cPanel to cPanel).

7-day money-back guarantee.

It has some security restrictions on shared hosting (e.g. SSH or direct MySQL access are not allowed).

This host is designed mostly for enterprises (managed VPS, Dedicated), but also offers shared hosting services.

Some notes for newbies in hosting:

One of the most important factors for you as a newbie in hosting is a helping hand of your host’s support. People on the other side of tickets, online chat or phone play very important role in making you happy with some technical stuff from setting up your site and making it work the way you want.

Any host on this page offer high-quality support, but the manner of support may be a bit different. I mean that for example more technical people don’t like being treated like newbies, whereas people with no hosting or website management experience suffer when they get professional and sophisticated but unclear response.

In this case for you as a newbie the easiest option is to go with managed WordPress-dedicated hosting which take care of your website performance (such as speeding up and optimization), enhanced security (protection from DDoS attacks and hacking), safety (backups) of your data. it will let you not bother about these technical things and focus on your website content and business.

Another option is to go with WordPress hosting company which does not do very much technical work for you by default such as optimization, enhanced security etc but which offers very approachable and newbie-friendly customer service that is available from ticket system, online chat and phone support.

Great and fast support available in many ways like that is expensive for hosting and it reflects in the prices you pay for the hosting.

I recommend LiquidWeb as the best (and the most expensive) option in this category, which also has very high server performance standards.

The cheaper alternative I’d recommend to have a look at if you are strict on your budget is SiteGround, which includs a free site builder (easy drag-and-drop). I know this host works very well for many people as a very good compromise between server performance and pricing with the level of support that newbies will enjoy.

But keep in mind that you can’t really compare SiteGround‘s $3.95/mo first year ($9.95/mo renewal) with LiquidWeb‘s $89/mo hosting. The latter is a more solid choice which means that its customer satisfaction is higher.

Also, if you don’t mind spending some time and learning how to manage technical aspects of your website, and you don’t need phone or online chat support and just starting out with your website, then you can go with some cheaper but very reliable options such as StableHost or HawkHost which will serve a great foundation for your website provided you do your home work (at least read about your website basic security, enhanced security and backups).

Thus, every host is a compromise between performance (speed, reliability), customer support, doing work for you and pricing. I totally understand that it may be very difficult to make a choice even between already selected hosts that you see on this page. So feel free to contact me if you think you need advice in your particular case.

Also you may want to have a look at this self-help guide along the hosts that I recommend:

And if after all you are still puzzled with your choice, I suggest going either with StableHost (fast and cheaper) or SiteGround (the best hosting for any needs with strong support). And if you need me to name simply one the best host, it’s SiteGround.

The hosts which make their clients happy the most often

Since 2013 I’ve been recommending the best hosts I know and people appreciate it very much. I’m very happy to get emails with words of appreciation from people who thank me for helping them choosing a hosting.

It’s worth noticing that the most often people are happy with the two hosts.

The first one (the most appreciated) is SiteGround. Absolutely no surprise here. Thanks to its one of the best support on the shared hosting market, awesome performance and very handy tools (like 1-click staging) this host is a favorite choice of the most number of people. Especially two kinds of clients adore SiteGround – beginners and WordPress developers/designers. Besides, the fact that it’s not expensive compared to other hosts of such quality brings a lot of satisfaction to people who use it.

The other host which makes people very happy is StableHost. The main reason is that it’s the best performing host with reliable support for the least possible price (thanks to my discount code which you can find in my review here). It is a smaller hosting company compared to SiteGround, but for many people with quite a limited budget this turns out the best choice.

If you are in doubt, feel free to contact me. My readers appreciate what I do for them and I’m very proud of it.

SiteGround is the best choice for the smallest budget (shared hosting pricing) that offers options for WP developers (1-click staging, easy Git integration).

LiquidWeb Managed WordPress Product is based on powerful fully managed VPS and has 1-click staging environment. The most expensive option (mostly due to the managed VPS and support) among my recommendations.

WPEngine is also a managed WordPress hosting that has 1-click staging environment. But it’s more restrictive on server resources and more affordable than LiquidWeb

FlyWheel goes a bit different way. It allows you to simplify your local WordPress development by offering a free application to use on your PC/Mac. This host is a very comfortable choice for WP design agencies (and you can get hosting for free and earn money if you resell hosting to your clients – see FlyWheel‘s agency partner program).

Digital Ocean is the most hardcore solution among the above options. It is the first choice for serious web application developers thanks to its handy infrastructure (Linux-based droplets), extensive tutorials and very low prices. Also, Linode is a superb choice for production environment.

All the hosts are superb in their segments and provide great value for the price.

Affordable Reseller Hosting

If you are looking for affordable reseller hosting from a reliable provider, then have a look at reseller options offered by very reliable hosting companies I recommend on this page.

If you are not going to resell hosting but just need multiple cPanel accounts, these companies offer you great options for that.

Not to repeat here again all the companies I recommend, I’ve picked out the most affordable prices for minimal shared hosting reseller plans:

SiteGround (It’s not a classic approach to reselling, but can be a better option in some cases. Check it out: the smallest price for a package costs €33 for one year. One package suitable for hosting just 1 website).

FlyWheel offers a great infrastructure for WordPress sites developing studios and WP design agencies (including easy management and support of your clients, team collaboration, staging for website development). Also it gives you a free hosting for your website (on a bulk plan). Become an agency partner to resell hosting to your clients and manage them easily.

Recommended managed VPS and Dedicated Servers

Here’s the list of very reliable companies that have great reputation among web hosting professionals (and clients, of course):

LiquidWeb (Windows, Linux): acknowledged professional provider with a wide range of products and paying extra attention to very responsive and timely support.

KnownHost (Linux): specializes in managed VPS and dedicated servers. Popular among VPS resellers.

WiredTree (Linux): offers configurable VPS and dedicated servers. Popular among those who start out their web hosting business or agencies/people managing their clients’ websites. By the way, WiredTree is a part of LiquidWeb since January 2017.

EuroVPS (Windows, Linux): smaller team with a professional attitude. The company and its datacenter is located in Europe, Netherlands.

BigScoots (Linux): this company is not as experienced (considering number of years in business) and not as big as some of the above ones, but since 2010 it has already proved to provide more than simply really good services and the team is proud of maintaining a great reputation. A part of their continuing success is that they are not keen on growing fast in order to keep up with the high standards of services.

These companies above are highly recommended for very serious and professional needs, web projects or just popular websites.

Recommended self-managed VPS are mentioned right below.

Very Affordable VPS

One of the most affordable VPS plans are offered by A2Hosting (both unmanaged and managed). It’s a relatively big hosting provider with a wide client base. VPS plans are very flexible (you can configure your own unmanaged VPS plan). The most basic plan costs $5/mo (paid monthly). For this price you will get 20 GB RAID-10 SSD Storage, 1 Core CPU, 2 TB Transfer, 512 MB RAM, Root Access. I recommend A2 Hosting VPS if you want to go with as cheaper as possible VPS, but from a very well-established provider. One of the advantages of this option is that you can very quickly go inexpensive managed if you realize that it’s necessary. By the way, A2 Hosting offers a free admin panel Webuzo for free for unmanaged VPS.

If your WordPress site has outgrown a shared hosting and you don’t want to go with a managed VPS for financial reasons, then self-managed VPS from these providers is a solid and much more affordable alternative.

And if you are a Linux professional and can do without technical support at all, then these two cloud VPS options can be attractive to you: Digital Ocean (popular for development) and Linode (popular for production).

By the way, you may want to check out all my recommended hosts from this perspective:

Windows ASP Web Hosting

Now and then I get asked what windows hosting I can recommend. Especially former clients of Arvixe suffer from not being able to find a good alternative to its windows hosting.

Before all, I am not a user of Windows hosting. And that’s why my recommendations below are based completely on my research of real user reviews. However, I’ve made my best try to find out the Windows hosting providers that is worth recommending and which can be a good and affordable Arvixe alternative.

I suggest checking out RDOServers.com. It’s a well-established company with great reputation and what’s especially important in shared windows hosting – technical support that really cares. However, RDOServers is a small company.

And if you feel more comfortable dealing with a bigger hosting with more support staff and hosting options, then you may prefer A2Hosting. It’s a well-known hosting providers which successfully operates both in Linux and Windows environments. A2 offers only shared windows hosting plans.

Also, as regards Windows VPS or dedicated server, then definitely have a look at some of the providers in this section.

Of course, this is not a full list of all the reliable web hosting companies that exist in the world. However, I have analyzed and chosen the above ones based on my research and the opinions of the people I trust.

And again, if you become a client of any these hosting companies after reading this article, I will feel a personal responsibility for this. So, in case of any issues that may arise with the hosting and which are not resolved to your satisfaction, you may contact me and I will participate in resolving the situation for you.

I’m sure you will be much more pleased by the value offered by these companies for the price paid, compared to many other hosting companies. These web hosts are great companies and you can surely go with any of them.

Last updated on August 16, 2017

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